Tuesday 5 July 2011

Here, There and Everywhere


Remember about a week ago I briefly mentioned I had learned a lot about being a wife over the last year?  Most of those lessons I will keep between Pete and I, but one thing I will share with you. 
It took me a year to get over my wedding. 
My wedding was beautiful and romantic and involved an around-the-world-ticket and two receptions.  However, as those of you that have planned a wedding well know, much of the wedding is about your family and a little bit is about you.  This was true of our wedding, for a number of reasons (most of which are personal and will stay that way).  So when I look back on my wedding, I don’t get nostalgic and weepy.  I feel exhausted.  Much like I did during the four-week extravaganza that was our world-wedding-tour.    
Those feelings have followed me for the past year.  We didn’t immediately live ‘happy ever after.’  A job fell through and subsequent jobs kept falling through and, as my regular readers know, I fell into another bought of depression (which I was barely keeping at bay throughout the end of the doctorate and wedding). 
As our anniversary approached, I felt a bit deflated.  I didn’t want to revisit ‘that’ day.  To be honest, I remember very little of the day.  But I did want to celebrate the life Pete and I have started to build in our little corner of London.  When we were planning the wedding, we lived in a northern suburb in a basement flat with tiny windows and a mould problem.  We weren’t going to have the wedding in Britain because we didn’t plan on being there for long.  A few months before the wedding, we moved to beautiful Greenwich.  It is a place we love and feel very much at home.  It is the place we officially started our new family and we are slowly building a place for ourselves here.  It feels great.  And, we frequently wish we had got married here. 
Which brings me to why some of you might be here in the first place.  I arranged for us to re-do our ‘I do.’  Sorta.  We put on our favourite bits of wedding gear (minus my fabulous fascinator) and had a date in our favourite place to celebrate the end of a tough year and a shift in our family focus.  This was a celebration of our new family.  Just us and our favourite place.*
And we brought a photographer along with us. 





You can see the best of the day over at our photographer's blog.  Dasha was lovely and suffered through one of the hottest days of the year to give us these great shots.  The best part?  Greenwich was teeming with people for the Greenwich/Dockland International Festival.  You would never know.  She managed to make it look like we had the place entirely to ourselves**.  Just like we felt on the day. 

I feel a new lightness in my head. I feel possibility. I have moved on from my wedding day and, hopefully, my difficult year and I will remember this week on my next anniversary and leave the exhaustion and fogginess of the 'real wedding.'




*Obviously, Africa will always be one of our favourite places, as will Istanbul. But the travel involved was a bit too much for the last minute photo shoot.  And this is about our present and future.

**A huge thank you to Dasha and Exhibit Emotions for jumping on board with a last minute request and creating such great memories for us. 

2 comments:

  1. That just literally brought a tear to my eye... Thank you so much! It means the world to me and it's one of the best feelings when someone likes my work)) Don't think about the past - it doesn't exist any more - that's what I've learned over the last couple of years. "Past is history; future is a mystery; today is a gift, that's why it is called Present..." - from Kung Fu Panda :-)

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  2. Mmmm, so worth it to celebrate the little things that really aren't so little. Glad it turned out so gorgeous . . . and what a freaking amazing dress you have on!

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